cURL filling up an HTML form with tcl - forms

Question

I need to make a Tcl program that logs into a web page and i need to fill up some information and get some information.
The page has lots of forms with diferent types of input, radio/check buttons, entry strings etc the usual.
i can log into the page no problem and fill up the forms without a problem but i have to fill EVERY input for that particular form or else it will be save as empty (the things i didnt specify)
Heres an example:
this is the form:
--- FORM report. Uses POST to URL "/goform/FormUpdateBridgeConfiguration"
Input: NAME="management_ipaddr" (TEXT)
Input: NAME="management_mask" (TEXT)
Input: NAME="upstr_addr_type" VALUE="DHCP" (RADIO)
Input: NAME="upstr_addr_type" VALUE="STATIC" (RADIO)
--- end of FORM
and this is the command i use to fill it up
eval exec curl $params -d upstr_addr_type=STATIC https://$MIP/goform/FormUpdateBridgeConfiguration -o /dev/null 2> /dev/null
where params is:
"\--noproxy $MIP \--connect-timeout 5 \-m 5 \-k \-S \-s \-d \-L \-b Data/curl_cookie_file "
yes i know is horrible but it is what it is .
In this case i want to change the value of upstr_addr_type to STATIC but when i sumit it i lose the info from management_ipaddr and management_mask.
This is a small example, i have to do this for every form and a gizillion more variables so its a real problem for me.
i figure its concept problem or something like that, i look and look and look some more, try -F -X GET -GET -almost every thing on cURL manual, can someone guide me here

Answer 1

If you know what the values of management_ipaddr and management_mask should be, you can just supply them as extra -d arguments. It probably makes sense to wrap this in a procedure
proc UpdateBridgeConfiguration {management_ipaddr management_mask upstr_addr_type} {
global MIP params
eval exec curl $params \
-d management_ipaddr=$management_ipaddr \
-d management_mask=$management_mask \
-d upstr_addr_type=$upstr_addr_type \
"https://$MIP/goform/FormUpdateBridgeConfiguration" \
-o /dev/null 2> /dev/null
# You ought to replace the first line of the above call with:
# exec curl {*}$params \
# Provided you're not on Tcl 8.4 or before...
}
Like that, you'll find it much easier to get the call correct. (You shouldn't need to specify -X POST for this; it's default behaviour when -d is provided.)
To get the existing values, you'll need to GET them from the right URL (which I can't guess for you) and extract them from the resulting HTML. Which might involve using a regular expression against the retrieved document. This is pretty awful, but it's what you're stuck with sometimes. (You can use tDOM to parse HTML properly — provided it isn't too ill-formed — and then use its XPath support to query for the values correctly, but that's rather more complex and introduces a dependency on an external package.) Knowing what the right RE to use is can be tricky, but it is likely to involve grabbing a copy of the form and doing something vaguely like this:
regexp -nocase {<input type="text" name="management_ipaddr" value="([^<"">]*)"} $formSource -> management_ipaddr
regexp -nocase {<input type="text" name="management_mask" value="([^<"">]*)"} $formSource -> management_mask
While in general it could be encoded all sorts of ways, that's very unlikely for IP addresses or masks! On the other hand, the order of the attributes can vary; you have to customize your RE to what you're really dealing with, not merely what it might be…
The curl invokation will be something like
set formSource [exec curl "http://$MIP/the/right/url/here" {*}$params 2>/dev/null]
It's much simpler when you're not having to send data up and you want to consume the result.